A History
by Tragedy Tay
Summary: She has gone by many names. Elphaba gen, mentions of Elphaba/Glinda and Elphaba/Fiyero.


title: A History

summary: She has gone by many names.

pairing: mentions of Elphaba/Glinda, the slightest hint of Elphaba/Fiyero. Bookverse.

rating: pg-13

a/n: another drabble. I usually stick to Glinda, so I wanted to see what I could do with Elphaba. The answer: not much, apparently.

-

_Fabala _was the first, and that is its only real significance.

Fabala brings to mind roly-polyness, overcooked food, a babe on her hip. Fabala is warm but ill-fitting, like wearing your father's boots to play in. Fabala is the blur of fire and family and _responsibility_. Fabala is someone who is tolerated and loved because they must be. Fabala is a mother and Fabala is a grasshopper.

A terror.

A sister.

Fabala is something she considers herself well-rid of.

- - -

_Elphie _is a girl that someone could like. Elphie is lanky arms and legs, just as awkward as her papa's boots had been, but without the smug swagger of the knowledge that this is just pretend, not you yourself. It was a strong sense of wearing something you ought not to, without the eagerness and novelty. Elphie is youth, firsts (feelings and outrages and kisses and disappointments and _those _kinds of looks), and someone worth knowing. Elphie is insults to be handed out and wisdom to bestow.

Elphie is someone to talk to and giggle with and touch when no one is looking. Elphie is swirled with a group. Elphie is tangled with another. She can bear Elphie the least of all, because Elphie is the one with such fucking worth to her. Elphie is needed for the sheer virtue of herself.

_Elphie sings._

Elphie is someone to haunt her dreams: _cool breath and painted lips upon her neck and breast and stomach and still farther, the inches of her, she had never imagined that there was so much to a body. She never imagined_.

"_Oh, Elphie_!"

Elphie makes her shiver. Wish.

Imagine.

- - -

_Fae _is revolution.

Fae is passion, using what she learned and taking what she must. Drunk on a heady cocktail of danger and ideals and willingness to go against every single one of them at the same time. Fae is a sound that she rather liked, which was all the reason she needed to pick it.

Fae is selfishness, allowing what she shouldn't, blurring the lines that she once firmly toed, when she ranted and raved from the safety of books and blankets and love deep enough to drown in.

But something had to be done, and someone had to do it, and that became her only unbendable law.

Fae is pure defiance, a challenge. The smell of sex mixing with the sticky stink of gunpowder and fitting so eerily well against one another. Fae would save the fucking world. Fae destroyed her own world and accomplished nothing and dragged the cloud of destruction over her life with the force of a cannon, and so she should hate her.

But Fae is the warrior. Fae is the heroine.

A hope.

- - -

_Auntie _is a frumpy, drawn-out joke. Auntie is a no-name in a household full of no-names, Auntie is as close to anonymity as she will ever be, and she is not quite sure how she likes the feel of it.

Most of all, Auntie is a game she plays, acting her part, getting her own small thrills out of it when she decides she might be able to wrestle a small moment of enjoyment out of the bleakness that overwhelms her days.

Auntie is work to be done.

She burst from a great bubble of blotchy, disfiguring grief and found herself with crippling guilt, a task, and a caricature of a family, or, failing that (perhaps she is wrong once again), simply a warm-enough bed.

To others, however, Auntie is strange and exciting in the most boring of ways, mumbles and twitches designed to keep others at bay while at the same time enticing them with the sheer oddness of it all. Auntie _knows_, you can tell it when she looks at you, her stare is full of important words going perpetually unsaid, there is a sense of waste lurking just beyond the more intense sensation of snow being dropped down your back that her glare also brings.

Auntie is no one at all. Auntie gives away nothing, but she knows everything about everything.

She must, you think, because of how she _looks_!

Only looks.

- - -

The Wicked Witch of the West is the legend.

And Elphaba lives.

- - -

end.


End file.
